Chess will never be solved, here's why

I like that Australia strategy, too. That's where some of the strategy around the neutral army can come in when you're playing a two person game. If your opponent gets dealt some territories in that part of the board, then you want to place the neutral army pieces there so they will have a harder time winning full control over the continent.

It wasn't until the 90s that those variants and house rules became published suggestions, but that reinforces my original point...the game has a lot of luck built into in it for a strategic game, and the players themselves "fixed it", with the publisher picking up on the best fixes.

I had typed up another paragraph about further variations to the rules, and decided to scrap it, but I thought the presence of a neutral army when two people play was around from the earliest version of the game?

They were added in the 1986 revised rules, I think.

Have you ever watched old TV, like Milton Berle? It's just bad, really bad. That's kind of how new games were back in the 50s and 60s. Nothing much more refined than, say, Hungry Hungry Hippos (which came out later, but I doubt you've played Ants in the Pants or Break the Ice, etc.).

Mille Borne was an exception. Stratego. Stuff like that.

There was also lot of WW1-WW2-ish war games like Tri-Tactics, L'Attaque, etc.

Chess and checkers, Go, etc. are the ones that stood the test of time. There was a popular medieval game called Fox and Geese that was strategic and like a distant cousin of Chess and Go. I think you can still find it being published somewhere.

Yeah, I'm going to mention the other variation I had in mind. It's recommended for beginners that you can only relocate armies from one territory to one adjacent territory at the end of your turn. An alternative to that rule is that you can move as many armies as you want between all connected territories during the redeployment phase. In later versions of the game, not as many variations to the rules are published. One of those options is left out, but I can't remember which one. There is also the commander option, where once per turn, as attacker and defender, you can change one die roll to a 6, signifying that a 'commander' was present during that battle. That rule is also not mentioned in newer rulebooks.

Lol, that's funny, they borrowed that from D&D house rules, which stole it from Runequest house rules...that instead of rolling 3d6 for stats, you rolled 2d6+6. I mean, who wants an adventuring type of game where your character can be below average? They are supposed to be exceptional.

A recent version of Risk comes with a dragon miniature that appears on the board and makes indiscriminate havoc among the armies.

Ugh. Don't cross the streams.

Here's a fantasy strategic war game:

https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/home/catalogue/publishers/avalon-hill/dragon-pass-game-of-gloranthan-warfare-avalon-hill/

The problem is that they go for about $150 now, if you see one on auction.

I would like to have been a hobbyist when that game came out. There are some companies that still make attractive strategy games every year, but, well, there's not really a network of avid gamers in my area that I know of. I've been to a few D&D groups, but that can be a tough way to meet new people.

I grew in the Mecca of gaming, but yeah people are lot more insular now. Smartphones FTW.

6 Blocks from me was a comic book and gaming store where you could go 16 hours a day and find 3-4 rooms constantly filled with people playing one game or another. The biggest room upstairs had a WW2 hexagon map style game screwed into the wall with the pieces magnetized (by hand) that ran for 6 months at a time (I mean they would get together a few hours a week, not playing every waking hour). It was not a custom map so I really wonder who published a map that size (about 8' by 10'). It was accurate to the Division/Brigade/Battalion level. Every single historical unit from WW2 was in the game. Sometimes a vet would come in and they would say "yeah, there's your unit right there...you're in luck, we're doing the Battle of El Alamein today...".

It's pretty amazing the games that actual history buffs put together. But you would find any kind of game there...if it was a game with more than 2 players, it would be there.

The rooms were rented for a dollar per person. Some of the weekly Runequest games in the largest room would have up to 20 people, with latecomers standing/leaning against the walls for the entire multi-hour session.

It's a Tofu restaurant now...

From Sylvie and Bruno Concluded by Lewis Carroll:

"That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"

"About six inches to the mile."

""Only six inches!"exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"

"Have you used it much?" I enquired.

"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well".

There is a similar fable by Borges, cited in Simulacra and Simulation, page 1.

The Americans and Russians "got in there" because you wanted to take a jab and tell us all how you saw a map somewhere, and inserted them yourself.

The topic might as well be about tofu, since chess will not be solved in our lifetimes and the only thing to "discuss" here is debunking crackpots that claim the game is a forced draw...whether they base that on wildly made-up math or whether they just think too much of their own personal opinion and "feelings" on the matter.

Can we agree that the game is more likely to be playable to a draw where the 50 move rule is enforced? Has that been brought up in this thread?

I have never seen a poster that thinks any differently. It's pretty obvious. But "more likely to be playable to a draw" in this case is one atom in a galaxy of the unknown and affects the issue of whether chess can be solved not at all.

It makes very little practical sense to posit spending decades building tablebases that assume rules that have changed before will not change again. Stick to the basic game as closely as possible when spending that much CPU time. The likelihood of, say, removing en passant is much less likely than FIDE changing tournament rules.

I had forgotten that Lewis Carroll wrote about this idea before Jorge Luis Borges did. The latter is known to have had a high regard for the former, describing his work as "authentic fantasy".

lets do the math: in an average chess position there are around 100 possible moves

with 10^120 chess positions so 10^122 but we have to do times three so it is

with 10^120*3 possible lines it would take 95,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years for stockfish to calculate chess

Your math is way off (it's 35-40-ish on average, 10^44, and *3 makes no sense), but the conclusion is effectively the same.

This forum has become invisible in the list at https://www.chess.com/forum/my_posted_in_topics.

At least for me.

[EDIT: posting this fixed the glitch]

Hi!
Dio corrected your post but I want to correct it some more.
10^120 refers to possible sequences of moves not positions.
Which is more like the Tromp number. About 5 x 10^44.
Which is arrived at by cutting down from 13^64.
The Tromp number is a very formidable number that tablebasing hasn't put any kind of Dent in yet.
More like a tiny scratch.
-----------------------------
Where did you get 100 possible moves in a position? That's rare.
A queen can have up to 27 moves possible - a rook 14 and a bishop 13 a knight 8 and a King 8.
But its very rare they'd all have maximum moves available.
Middlegames often have around 50 moves available and endgames around 30.
But the average would be less than that.